Nasty, brutish and short — and so very confusing

As I understand it, here’s what happened: An antiabortion activist made secret tapes of Planned Parenthood officials talking to people they believed were in the stem cell transport and resale market. One official said things that might be considered callous, speculating on the market value of various kinds of tissues.

The activist accused Planned Parenthood of selling its fetal tissue for profit — a charge that the tape does not support and that Planned Parenthood has denied. So what’s left? Businesspeople talking to other businesspeople about a legal, non-secret transaction.

Planned Parenthood is (among other things) a business. It has to keep the doors open and the lights burning; it also has to pay the people who work for it, although not that much.

And it has to figure out a way to transport its fetal tissue to the doctors and laboratories who need it for research into diseases of all sorts. And, because this is the real world, the middleman must get a taste, and of course the labs have to pay the middleman.

This is not a surprise. When stem cell research was approved, everyone knew where the stem cells came from. Indeed, some labs had to post guards to prevent intrusions, because there’s nothing like destroying beakers to change the world. But, OK, they come from dead babies.

Dead fetuses would be the more correct term, but really — it’s because they’re potential babies that women want to get rid of them. It is dangerous and stupid to bring an unwanted baby into the world, and women should have the absolute choice about whether they want to use their bodies that way.

It is, after all, the women who are too often left caring for the baby alone when Mr. Wonderful becomes entranced with the idea of all those honeys in Miami.

So why dwell on it? Because the antiabortion folks know that a lot of Americans are squeamish. They don’t like the icky parts. They hate the, well, hint of dismemberment that the tapes provide. There are, of course, no functioning organs involved; it’s various medical classifications of tissue. Different types of tissue are used in different kinds of research.

There are many icky things in life, like death. Have you heard about death? It’s really bad. People die incontinent, insane and in pain. Bodily fluids — you don’t even want to know. And some die because bombs made in foreign countries and dropped by other foreign countries fall on their heads. Or worse, 50 yards away, so all they have is a gaping stomach wound.

You want icky? That’s icky.

But we’re all going to die — even you. Such a bummer. And dead bodies — another icky thing. Best to cover them in flowers and sanctify the hell out of them. I entirely support rituals of grief and mourning that allow people to come to terms with the death of a loved one. I entirely support the outpouring of community support at those times. We need rituals.

But the body itself — what’s the big deal? Sell it for parts and use it to fertilize trees. Or, at least, don’t get all woo-woo about it. I sat for hours in a teahouse in Nepal with a dead body, uncovered, just lying there. At sunrise, it was burned on a ridge line. That ain’t bad.

The disposal of fetuses may be icky as well, but it’s a humane solution to a delicate problem. Things are better because we have stem cells to experiment with. We make drugs, drugs that save lives or mitigate symptoms. Would these antiabortion folks refuse to take, say, a cancer drug because stem cells were used in its creation?

And how would they even know? Stem cell research might one day be as widespread as animal experiments. Oh, right, more ick: They kill animals to test drugs that may be effective in battling whichever strain of awfulness. I know you’re against killing animals, but even vegetarians want a more effective flu vaccine.

You may want out of civilization. You may think abortion is murder. But the human condition is intimately tied to death. The death of a fetus, the death of a monkey, the death of a child in Syria or the death of a coal miner in West Virginia. They could all be prevented. But we’ve decided as a culture that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

I think it’s great to protest that which you find offensive or immoral. But protest is all a matter of picking and choosing — you can try to entrap representatives of Planned Parenthood or you can protest the toxic contaminants of rivers and lakes. Or unjust wars. Or slavery in Southeast Asia.

Let’s look it all in the face. We are forced to choose among brutalities. The moral balances are unsettling and hard; it is unwise to pretend otherwise.

“When I’m a Duchess,” she said to herself (not in a very hopeful tone though), “I won’t have any pepper in my jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.